Representations of the African-American slave woman as breeder and
sexual object, as farm worker, or domestic and industrial laborer do not
seem to exist in the early literature of the United States. No literary
portraits, either authentic or distorted, were drawn of African-American
women for almost two centuries after their arrival in Jamestown, Virginia.

In Virginia, the 1624-1625 census showed the presence of twenty-three
Africans: eleven males, ten females, and two children. This group of
Africans was probably the last to enter and work in the United States as
indentured servants. Within a short time, their status and their lives would
be restricted by ever more stringent and repressive legislation, which,
while constricting African-American men, even further constrained African-American women.

Before long, several state legislatures had adopted the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, that is, the child inherits the condition of the
mother. With this ruling, the African female in the American colonies
acquired a new status. Planters recognized that they could more quickly
amass necessary capital by breeding the African slave women. As a result,
enforced breeding of Africans became the norm.

The African woman did not freely accept another's control of her body
just as she did not freely accept slavery; she had to be prepared for it, and
this preparation began in Africa. The African economy during the seventeenth century was based on agriculture, which in some areas nearly
approached the complexity of the plantation system in the Southern states.
The traditional African agricultural and social systems required that

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